Mark Bunker of XENU TV · CC BY-SA 3.0

Robert Jay Lifton spent his career studying how ordinary people come to participate in atrocity, developing the concept of the atrocity-producing situation through his study of American soldiers in Vietnam and, in The Nazi Doctors (1986), the physicians who staffed Auschwitz. His earlier book Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima won the 1969 National Book Award, and his Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961) coined the term "thought-terminating cliché" from his study of Chinese coercive indoctrination — work that helped establish PTSD as a diagnosis and shaped how psychiatry understands trauma.